A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

by Lev Golinkin

Overview

A compelling memoir—"hilarious and heartbreaking" (The New York Times)—of two intertwined journeys: a Jewish refugee family in Ukraine fleeing persecution and a young man seeking to reclaim a shattered past

In the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border, leaving Ukraine with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past.

This is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of Lev Golinkin in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union, and "of a Jewish family’s escape from oppression ... whose drama, hope and heartache Mr. Golinkin captures brilliantly” (The New York Times). It's also the story of Lev Golinkin as an American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible ... and say thank you.

Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir—it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat—and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345806338
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	266,752
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.  Mr. Golinkin, a graduate of Boston College, came to the US as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in 1990.  His op-eds and essays on the Ukraine crisis have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Time.com, among others; he has been interviewed by WSJ Live and HuffPost Live.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Prologue 1

Part 1

The Best Parades in the Whole Damn World 7

The Black Witch Comes to Kharkov 18

Oleg and the Mirror 27

Disarming the Adversaries 31

A Marked Mikhail Will Destroy Russia 38

Something Was Different; Something Was in the Air 48

Land of Endless Twilight 53

$130, Two Suitcases, One Piece of Jewelry, Nothing of Value 63

Into the Steppe 79

Part 2

Dozens of Sentinel Grandmas 103

Where People Have No Names 121

The Forester 131

Waking the Nomads 144

Pennies and Peach Slices 149

A Layover in Purgatory 161

Eva 168

A Bleak, Man-Made Horizon 173

Nineteen Million in the Hole 179

The Bosnians Don't Come Out at Night 183

A Simple Request 190

Part 3

This Ain't Ellis Island 201

Refugee Sponsorship for Dummies 208

Where Else Does She Belong? 214

Unfinished Business, Part I: Getting to America 222

Where the Weak Are Killed and Eaten 230

There Are No Cats in America 242

Where Am I and Why Do I Smell Like Bananas? 249

Unfinished Business, Part II: Staying in America 263

Alicia 269

One Man, One Jacket 275

Kilcoyne 281

Epilogue 295

Acknowledgments 305

Editorial Reviews

"[A] hilarious and heartbreaking story of a Jewish family’s escape from oppression....whose drama, hope and heartache Mr. Golinkin captures brilliantly...A wonderful writer, witty and economical, he generally applies a light touch to emotionally heavy material. Adversity offers him rich comic material."
—The New York Times

"An awesome intercontinental whirlwind, funny and smart. Go Ukraine!"
—Gary Shteyngart, bestselling author of Little Failure 

"Golinkin's memoir is a look into life during the Cold War, as well as a coming-of-age-story about finding yourself and where you belong. And reading the harrowing details of his family's exodus will have you counting your own blessings—and hugging the people you love."
—Glamour.com 

"Mr. Golinkin excels at these moments, describing the emotional truth of immigration... His account is so raw that it manages to capture at a visceral level the feelings of many of the million Soviet Jews who left their homeland at the Cold War’s end."
—The Wall Street Journal

"[Lev Golinkin] convincingly relates the purgatory of statelessness, the confused anticipatory state of the immigrant."
—The Chicago Tribune

"Best memoir title of the year...Golinkin's A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka is fueled not by sly humor but by a potent cocktail of earnestness and anger."
—The Oregonian

"Outstanding, original, and deeply moving."
—Chuck Hogan, bestselling author of The Town and co-author of The Strain

"As the author turned nine during the Soviet Union’s final years, his Jewish family fled hostile Kharkov, in Ukraine, with virtually no possessions and made their way through central Europe to the U.S. After college, he retracted their steps, thanking the NGO workers and patrons who’d helped them – including the son of an unrepentant Nazi Austrian baron. Golinkin’s account of the whole saga is lucidly intelligent and humanistic – and deeply moving."
—ELLE (The Elle's Lettres 2015 Readers' Prize)

"A vibrant, stylish work of literary nonfiction that's equally joyous and tragic."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philly.com)

"Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, there is a vibrant literary canon written by former Soviet Jews who have come of age in America. Gary Shteyngart may be the group’s founding father; Anya Ulinich, its graphic novelist; Yelena Akhtiorskaya, its newest ingenue. Mr. Golinkin, with this deeply personal and sometimes painful dissection of the split identity of an emigre, has grabbed the role of psychotherapist."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
"Despite the serious topic, Golinkin writes with a light touch; he has a natural sense of humor and an easy style...[A Backpack, a Bear, and] Eight Crates of Vodka opens with a depiction of breathtaking cruelty. But by the end, readers may feel breathless at the incredible kindness of strangers."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There’s a gem on every page of A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka. Lev Golinkin has the skill and vision necessary to tell the story of a crumbling empire, and the soulfulness and flair to capture that story in the saga of one man. He’s an alert, and witty, and humane storyteller. I will eagerly read anything he writes.”
—Avi Steinberg, author of Running the Books and The Lost Book of Mormon

"Golinkin came to America as a Ukrainian child refugee with only what he and his family could carry. But he's found his family fortune in their exodus story—a soulful tale that is both incredibly beautiful and wickedly funny, a tale of being lost, being found and finding home."
—Helene Stapinski, author of Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History 
 
"An unforgettable coming-of-age memoir of a boy from Soviet Ukraine that entertains as it conveys insight into the meaning of America in today's turbulent world."
—Jack F. Matlock, Jr., former ambassador to the Soviet Union under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and author of Reagan and Gorbachev and Autopsy on an Empire

"In Lev Golinkin’s skillful memoir, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, we share his family’s traumatic flight to freedom from Soviet Ukraine, and then a young man’s brave attempt to build a meaningful life in the United States."
—Peter Eisner, author of The Pope’s Last Crusade

"[Lev] Golinkin's personal tale of childhood in the Ukraine has the specificity of his own story at its heart, and becomes more than just a woeful yarn about repression in the Soviet Bloc. It can be heartbreaking, but in unexpected and nuanced ways...When he catches up with the present, the narrative fractures, skipping between his return voyage to the Ukraine to answer his own questions about leaving and accounts of his family's early experiences in their new country. All these strains are working at once in the story, as they are in his mind, as he digs up repressed memories and reassembles fragmented ones. Golinkin's memoir travels along at a confident clip, giving readers not just an immigrant story, but also a detailed look at how the mind wraps itself around a complicated life."
—Biographile.com

"Golinkin writes with dry humor about his experience but connects emotionally...A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka blends memoir and history into an intimate tale of personal growth."
—BookPage

“Golinkin convincingly portrays the miseries, and rare joys, of his bullied, furtive childhood, and the limits it put on him….[He] has created a deeply moving account of fear and hope.”
—Publishers Weekly

"An ex-Iron Curtain refugee-turned-American citizen tells the emotional story of how he and his parents fled the Ukraine two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union...Unflinching honesty. A mordantly affecting chronicle of a journey to discover that 'you can't have a future if you don't have a past.'"
—Kirkus Reviews

"Golinkin’s early memories are touchingly true to those of a youngster, and he reports on his family members’ fears, troubles, persistence, and patience with a keen eye and a memorable voice...Eye-opening for those who come to the U.S. and for those who help them do so."
—Booklist

From the Publisher

…hilarious and heartbreaking…In 1987, fewer than 10,000 Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. But by 1990, as the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev took hold, that number soared to 200,000, an exodus that passed virtually unnoticed, overshadowed by the larger convulsions of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, but whose drama, hope and heartache Mr. Golinkin captures brilliantly…A wonderful writer, witty and economical, he generally applies a light touch to emotionally heavy material. Adversity offers him rich comic material. He delights in absurdity.

The New York Times - William Grimes

07/21/2014
In late 1989, an 11-year-old Golinkin and his family joined the Jewish diaspora from what would soon be the former Soviet Union. Despite having little connection to their Jewish heritage, the Golinkins had been harassed, bullied, and seen their prospects blocked due to their ethnicity. Their exile brought them first to Austria, where they developed an important friendship with a local baron whose father was an unrepentant Nazi. Soon after, they received asylum in the college town of West Lafayette, Ind. Decades later, Golinkin retraced his journey and interviewed the people who had made his escape possible. Golinkin convincingly portrays the miseries, and rare joys, of his bullied, furtive childhood, and the limits it put on him. As he takes on an American identity, he rejects every aspect of his previous life, from its language to a faith he barely knew, a rejection that includes his choice of colleges (he attended the Roman Catholic Boston College).Trauma and his attempts to deal with it give substance to his book, although Golinkin supplements his memories with interviews and research that add important context. While the narrative grows choppy at the end as it devolves into a series of postscripts, Golinkin has created a deeply moving account of fear and hope. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-08-27
An ex-Iron Curtain refugee-turned-American citizen tells the emotional story of how he and his parents fled the Ukraine two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.Golinkin was 11 years old when he and his family went into exile. They were among thousands of other Jews seeking political asylum and an end to the anti-Semitism that they and their ancestors before them had been forced to endure. The family was secular; however, that fact did nothing to protect them from harassment and social oppression. The trauma ran so deep that Golinkin developed a severe case of self-hatred that haunted him into adulthood. The family's path away from the Soviet Union took them to Vienna, where two American Jewish aid organizations assisted them and other refugees in beginning the long process toward finding homes in Israel and the West. The family encountered an Austrian baron named Peter. Driven by anguish over his father's Nazi past, Peter helped get Golinkin's father a temporary job to rebuild lost work credentials and prepare him for future gainful employment rather than a life condemned to "delivering pizzas and driving taxis." Eventually, the family settled in West Lafayette, Indiana, where Golinkin's sister was accepted into the Purdue graduate engineering program even though she, like her father, had been stripped of all credentials. Meanwhile, the author rejected every aspect of his former life, including his faith and language, and chose to go to a Roman Catholic college in Boston. Yet ironically, it was in this most un-Jewish of settings where he would begin the process of breaking through years of accumulated anger, pain and rage and accepting himself as a Jew. While the narrative becomes increasingly fractured near the end of the book, Golinkin still manages to impact readers with the force of his unflinching honesty. A mordantly affecting chronicle of a journey to discover that "you can't have a future if you don't have a past."

Kirkus Reviews